Todd Tanner's blog

My friend Steve Mate once told me that it was bound to happen, and he was right. I was guiding on the Henry's Fork, floating two gentleman from Texas down the Box Canyon, when the fellow in the bow turned toward me.

When I first started fly fishing back in the ‘80s, I used to drive forty five minutes to a lonesome stretch of river, leave the pavement behind for a bumpy dirt road that twisted through the maples and oaks of rural New England, park, and then hike a half mile or more down an overgrown trail through the briars and brambles that paralleled the river’s edge.

Back when I was working as a fly fishing guide in Montana and Idaho, I spent every spare moment fishing. While that may seem like an odd choice to some folks, it made perfect sense to me. Guiding and fishing are two very different things, and while I enjoyed my guiding, I’ve always loved my fishing more.

Every day, we—my wife, my son and I—are infused with the blessings of public lands. And not in some vague, generalized, ambivalent sense; not in the way that some folks are inspired by the presence of public lands as a remote bastion of wilderness or as a metaphor for freedom. When my family turns on the tap, water that falls as rain or snow on the Swan Range a mile or so to our east - water that works its way down through the cracks and crevices of those sheer, gorgeous, publicly-owned mountains - comes gushing out from our faucet and slakes our thirst.

The world continues to go to hell in a hand-basket. Anyone want to go fishing?

by Todd Tanner - Thursday, May 11th, 2017

Photo: Mike Sepelak

￼I went fishing for a couple days last week. Not that my time on the water is news, or a big deal, but it was awfully important from a mental health perspective. We all need to take the occasional day off, and fishing—or in this particular case, rowing a couple of other anglers down the river for the better part of two days—was exactly the kind of therapy I needed.

I was in the living room and my wife was in the kitchen when Riley started barking out in the yard. It wasn’t your standard “deer” bark, either, so when I heard Molly yell, “Riley, no!!!” I jumped up and ran for the door. The local coyotes were hanging around our place and I was worried that our retriever was in trouble with the wild dogs.

By the time I made it outside the barking had stopped, and Molly and Riley were standing near the massive cottonwood that shades the northwest corner of our home.

Legendary guide and respected artist Bob White sure knows how to throw a great party. Bob has learned that if he brings fly fishermen together at the right time and in the right place, they can catch huge muskies on fly rods. With that in mind, he’s arranged for some of the world’s best musky guides to rendezvous in northern Wisconsin on September 22, 23 & 24, where they’ll float 10 lucky anglers down the Chippewa and Flambeau rivers in search of massive water wolves.

The release of a wild rainbow from the Smoky Mountains (photo: Rueben Browning).

There’s a tension at the heart of fly fishing, a baffling, bulbous, gordian knot that we can’t untie with logic or reason or emotion. Yet most of us — in fact, the vast majority of us — are not even aware of the issue.

I drove over to the West Fork late this afternoon. Molly was gone for the day, off to Idaho with her friend Elizabeth, and I’d been holed up in the house with the doors and windows shut to keep the heat - low nineties in the shade, a hundred and two outside in the direct sun - at bay.

Plastic bottles and other marine debris wash up on beaches like this one (photo: NOAA).

We live in an imperfect world where the problems we face as anglers — what fly to use, where to fish, what rod to buy, how to fix leaky waders — are dwarfed by a whole litany of issues that impact not only our fly fishing but also our day-to-day lives. Our political system is dysfunctional. Our economy is held together with balling wire and duct tape. Free market fundamentalists and rapacious profiteers are trying to steal the public lands where we fish, hike, hunt and camp. Our oceans are filling with plastic, and growing ever more acidic.